Galvin at the Athanaeum, Mayfair

I've long been a fan of the Galvin bros' flagship Windows restaurant, at the top of the Hilton Park Lane, and have had many wonderful meals there over the years. It's top-end dining at the top of the world, and you pay for it, but if you come away with anything other than a fierce desire to go back and do it all again as soon as possible then you've got a heart of stone.

But if I'm brutally honest, and that's hopefully why you're here, I've never had a completely knockout dinner at any of the Galvins' more "accessible" lower-budget joints, such as the Bistro de Luxe or La Chapelle. Objectively I know they're very decent places that many of my friends hold in extremely high regard, it's just for whatever reason I find it quite difficult to get too excited about French classics like escargots or crème brulée and would rather pay the extra to do full haute cuisine or tighten the purse strings and drop in somewhere like Zédel where they do regional French for about £20 a head. Which leaves more left over to spend on wine.

The good thing about the Galvin brand though is that they are always evolving. Even Windows, under the regime of its new Korean-born chef Joo Won, has started moving in more interesting Asian-fusion directions and a recent meal involved kimchi and bulgogi and all sorts of K-buzzwords to fantastic effect. And I've heard great things about the new Galvin HOP, Café a Vin as was, which has drawn itself a madly eccentric menu of burgers, pork chops and hot dogs, US/UK comfort food staples given a French aesthetic. So it was clearly time to give a Galvin other than Windows a try. And with that in mind I'm very glad I accepted an invite to the Athentaeum hotel in Mayfair and to Galvin at the Athenaeum.

But before dinner, drinks; excellent gin martinis in their ground floor which, thanks to giant floor-to-ceiling windows framing a living tropical wall, was like drinking in a giant vivarium. I can't say a great deal more about a martini in a hotel bar, but as martinis in hotel bars go, this was one of the good ones.

Relocated in the restaurant now, and you can tell a lot about a place from its bread offering. The bread at Athanaeum, just like I've enjoyed at Windows in the past, is this plaited baguette (it probably has a fancy boulangerie name but I don't know it) which breaks apart into lovely warm chunks just begging to be covered in salted butter.

First of the starters was a huge and unapologetically French slab of foie gras, wrapped in a clever ring of spiced bread and served with a kind of alcohol-poached apple segment topped with toasted walnuts, and dollops of cherry purée. And it was immensely enjoyable, with loads of flavour and not suffering from any hint of "fridge chill" which can spoil many a foie gras experience.

And this was a beautifully rich seafood soup, light and frothy and perfectly seasoned, presented with separate little pots of croutons, grated gruyere and rouille. Whether it's the miserable London winter weather or the fact that a soup is quite a good test of a kitchen's attention to detail, I seem to have been ordering a lot of soup in restaurants recently. And this was a fine example.

I make no apologies for ordering a burger for my main course. Years after the burger craze "hit", and certainly a long time after a good burger was a novelty in London I am still happily ordering them because they just hit every pleasure point I need in a single item of food - salt, fat, texture, and a great big oozing mound of bloody loose beef. The Galvin burger, which they've practised at the bar at Windows and refined at the Hop place in Spitalfields, is a genuinely lovely thing, perfect ratios of salad, beef and bread, and with a layer of good French cheese (possibly Comté but don't quote me on that).

But if you still insist on turning your nose up at burgers, then how about bolstering your bourgeois credentials with this - a neat pot of cassoulet, which had been "poshed up" by cooking duck breast to pink separately then arranging it on top of the bean mixture. It, too, was a comforting yet thoughtful bit of cooking, and further evidence that the Galvins can not only come up with a good recipe but crucially also hire the right people to replicate it as their business expands.

The meal ended with this Ille Flottante (sorry, "Floating Island" - see also "Caramelised apple tart" instead of "tarte tatin" as the Galvin menu writers attempt to stay French without being alienating) which packed a good hit of vanilla and chunks of caramelised (I think) chestnut studded in the Crème Anglaise. Sorry, "custard".

So despite my initial misgivings about any Galvin that doesn't involve being on the 28th floor of a Hilton, we thoroughly enjoyed every bit of this meal (including the service from our Londoner waitress, which was charming). What's interesting is that in their efforts to create a kind of hybrid French-English hotel restaurant, which in lesser hands would have ended up with a weak approximation of both and probably disappointing lovers of both French and English food simultaneously, they've almost accidentally ended up with quite an exciting third way. The idea of French cooking techniques being applied to English ingredients is hardly new, but that's not the only thing going on here. Dishes like the foie gras and the Ille Flottante (despite the Anglicised name) are recognisably French, and the burger and presumably things like the sticky toffee pudding are fairly solidly English, but they sit together on this menu quite happily because it's probably only in a hotel restaurant situation you'd be allowed to cherry pick the best of both and still come away with a coherent menu.

And since you didn't ask, the room for the night which was also kindly gifted as part of the review package was very nice too, on the 6th floor with views of Green Park. It's a strange thing, spending a night in a five star hotel in your own home town, but I can't pretend it wasn't great fun being a tourist for the night, checking in luggage, strolling down for dinner and then instead of rolling onto a bus for the journey to Battersea, heading for a night walk around Mayfair, taking in the lights of Piccadilly and shouting "You fools! You Goddamn fools!" at the queues outside the Hard Rock Café next door. Gives a whole new perspective on things, and a whole new set of reasons to fall in love with London all over again.

8/10

I was invited to eat, and stay, at the Athenaeum.

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The Cartford Inn, Great Eccleston

The North West of England has, scattered around its greenest and most pleasant parts, from the Trough of Bowland to the Yorkshire Dales, from Cumbria to Pendle Hill, some of the very best places to eat in the entire country. While the big cities struggle with form and format, lurching nervously from lazy pastiche of the latest London trends to overblown, overpriced Michelin-bait, the country pubs of Lancashire and Yorkshire quietly get on without fuss or fanfare, doing what they've always done, lovely people serving lovely food in lovely surroundings.

It was at a recent lunch to publicise this fact (in Central London of all places) that I came across the Cartford Inn, who served a dish of Fleetwood hake and Morecambe Bay shrimp as part of a Who's Who of fine Lancastrian restaurants, including the Parkers Arms in Newton-in-Bowland and the Freemason's at Wiswell. It was more than enough to have me googling where on earth Cartford was and planning a little trip there over Xmas with my parents from our base in Liverpool.

And, overall, I'm glad we did, although perhaps the place I'd invented in my head thanks to the association with the the best of the Forest of Bowland would never sit well the reality of a large family pub just off the M55 near Poulton-le-Fylde. Because first of all, unlike some of its colleagues at that press event in London, the Cartford Inn does not sit in the breathtaking countryside of an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty but in the rather more bleak and geographically mundane marshlands east of Blackpool, and the view from the dining room was not of rolling Ribble Valley hills but of an out-of-season caravan park and a silted river.

Still, that's hardly their fault, and all would be well if the food was up to scratch. Things started brightly, with a pretty plate of smoked Mallard breast, powerfully seasoned and not too smoky, with a crisp fried heart and a few dollops of seasonal veg. The flesh of the duck was perfectly pink and moist, and there seemed a good amount of it for the £8 asking price, so I had few complaints here.

Smoked "pink shrimps" (big enough to earn the name "prawns", really) were juicy and plentiful, served with saffron aioli. One thing you can usually rely upon in Northern pubs (even if it's sometimes the only thing) is portion size, and so it proved at the Cartford Inn. Most of them were carrying eggs too, which was a nice little caviar-y bonus. So far so good.

Mains, unfortunately, were a little less exciting. "Braised, roast and confit local rabbit" tagliatelle was a vast mound of meat and pasta, which on the face of it sounds like it might be fun, but you have to be very careful with rabbit to stop it turning dry and chewy and I'm afraid the Cartford Inn were only partially successful on this front. The confit leg was OK but the ballotines of breast (I think) were pretty inpenetrable. Also this was a ludicrously massive portion - what you see in the photo was just one layer of meat & salad and hid enough (decent) pasta to sink a battleship. Full marks for generosity, less for execution.

My oxtail pud was good. Not great, not Hind's Head faultless-perfect-brilliant, just good. There wasn't quite enough gravy inside or out, the mash was a bit dull and the accompanying vegetables a bit over, but it was still comforting and wintery and packed with filling.

I'll admit that once seeing this weird thing arrive at the table the last thing I wanted to do was sample it. So I can't tell you what "Cornbread eggy bread, smoky spicy beans, watercress" tasted like, only that dad ate all of it without too much complaint, even the weird anaemic-looking beans. Mind you, he cooks roast potatoes in coconut oil because he thinks it's healthier so I wouldn't invest too much in his opinion.

Up until this point, service had been friendly and attentive in that easy Lancastrian style, and although the food hadn't been stellar we were still enjoying our lunch thanks to some very reasonable wines and the cosetting of amiable staff. However, as the place filled up it seemed our little table in the corner fell down their list of priorities, and by the time the main courses were cleared, it dropped away completely. We sat for about a half hour waiting for someone to even offer us the dessert menu never mind another glass of wine, before eventually giving up and paying at the till at the way out.

A disappointing end, then, to what could have been a fairly decent lunch. True, the food is hardly in the same league as some of the very best of the North West gastro-titans but neither is it anywhere near the bottom of the league either, and with a bit more of an effort on service I could have given it a much less qualified endorsement. As it is, I'll leave it to you to decide whether it's worth the trip to this bleakish spot on the River Wyre when the same distance the other side of the M6 are some genuinely notable restaurants for pretty much the same money. With much nicer views. Still, it's better than most places in Liverpool.

6/10

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Jamavar, Mayfair

There's nothing a restaurant blogger likes more than a clear narrative. And by that I don't just mean the clear triumphs or a complete disasters of places that I can happily praise to high heaven or thoroughly trash - that goes without saying. I'm talking also about anywhere that operates on a consistent decent level under difficult circumstances, or perhaps somewhere that despite its huge budget and palatial surroundings is churning out substandard product. It's strangely satisfying as a critic to spot where the problems lie or to recognise real effort and report accordingly. Makes my "job" (such as it is) a lot easier.

But sometimes, a restaurant just doesn't play by the rules. After my first visit to Jamavar, a lavishly appointed spot on Mount Street in Mayfair, I was more than sure I knew exactly all I needed to know. After a warm welcome and having been settled on a plush leather banquette, a dainty arrangement of crisp snacks arrived, cones of spicy baked poppadums, mini chickpea poppadums, and crisp-fried plantain. With them, a selection of chutneys - refreshing coriander, rich mango and a tomato-chilli. Just the kind of start you need in a high-end Indian restaurant, everything wonderfully seasoned and perfectly-pitched.

Next, "crispy guineafowl malligai" which is still the greatest thing I've known happen to guineafowl (ordinarily not a particularly interesting beast). With an addictive dry-crunch coating containing soft, expertly spiced morsels of game, this was a completely wonderful bit of cooking, like the best spicy chicken nuggets in the world. Topped with a cooling dollop of mango "pachadi" and a very interesting dry cherry-shaped chilli of some kind, it satisfied on every conceivable level.

If you try only one fish dish at Jamavar - hell, if you have only one fish dish anywhere this year - make sure it's the stone bass tikka. Timed with NASA-like precision to be just-cooked but without a hint of dryness, coated in a dreamily complex set of spices and matched with a chilli-spiked avocado dressing, I will stake my reputation (such as it is) on the fact that there can hardly be a better fish dish in town right now. And yes, I am including my previous favourite the Hariyali Sea Bream at Trishna (at the time not uncoincidentally cooked by the current Jamavar head chef, Rohit Ghai, although the recipe was of course a Karam Sethi original) in that assessment. It is a complete knockout and you should go and order it as soon as you possibly can.

As if all that wasn't enough, Jamavar's black dhal is yet another work of art, a creation so dense and multifaceted in flavour, almost chocolately in its intensity, that to sample it is to fall deeply in love. At the risk of repeating myself, I would be very surprised indeed if you managed to eat a better dhal in a restaurant in London than this.

So, I had my story. Despite a minor service niggle - the menu had been printed with a second 'small plates' page instead of main courses causing a bit of confusion at first - and what is by most standards quite a whacking price point (the 3 courses above with no drink or bread came to just under £50), this was a clear 9/10 restaurant, confident and mature Indian cooking in surroundings that make sense of the budget. A great restaurant.

But partially because I worry about writing up a restaurant based on only 3 dishes and partly because I just loved it so much I wanted to return as soon as possible, the next day I was back. And almost from the first moment, things started go to skewiff. Firstly, despite a completely empty dining room at the stroke of midday, I was told they needed my table back by 1:30pm. This would never have been an issue had they not mentioned it, as I only ever have an hour for lunch, but someone had clearly decided they'd rather make me feel slightly unwelcome than just manage table allocations a bit better. But fine, their place, their rules. And if it was a bit of a surprise to see that the issue with the double-printed menu pages still hadn't been fixed, it was more perplexing to have the staff arguing quite vociferously amongst themselves as to whose fault this was, within easy earshot, after I'd pointed it out.

I would necessarily expect the £25 lunch menu to involve cheaper ingredients and perhaps less elaborate techniques. This is after all what lunch menus are for. But the first dish, a kind of pork terrine with quail's egg was quite clumsily executed, the pork being almost inedibly salty and the strange balancing-act presentation looking a bit naff.

Fortunately the lamb seekh kebab up next was much better, soft and gently spiced and while perhaps a bit more anaemic-looking than some of the best examples in town (*cough* Tayyabs *cough*), but still enjoyable. The cold, unseasoned bean salad didn't do much for it, though.

Butter chicken suffered from a slightly thin flavour and slightly dry pieces of chicken. It wasn't a complete disaster by any means, just wasn't that much better than any butter chicken you'd pick up from a high street Indian, and at these prices I think I'm right to expect a bit more.

Aloo was decent, but the dhungar dhal was a bit underpowered, certainly not a patch on the black dhal from the day before. Again, all these things are surely consequences of the cheaper lunch menu but were still quite disappointing given the fireworks the same kitchen seemed capable of elsewhere.

All of which conspired to leave my so-called "story" in a bit of a state. I couldn't rave about the place, nor dismiss it, nor even come up with any sensible theories as to why this lunch menu was so clumsy even despite its cheaper price point, while the highlights of the a la carte were out of this world good. It just didn't make much sense, especially as that stone bass tikka is actually available on the lunch menu as a main.

Even a third visit (evening so too dark for photos), this time under invitation of the head chef and an opportunity to try a great deal more of the ALC offerings, didn't help settle the matter because now we were back to Jamavar Mode A - dazzling cooking and exquisite presentation, in particular a shami kebab in a thick, dark sauce that brought to mind fine oxtail soup, and a Bengali fish dish which showed yet more supremely skillful ways with seafood.

But you know what, it's hard not to give Jamavar the benefit of the doubt. The fact is, anywhere capable of dishes like the guinea fowl, or the stone bass tikka, or the black dhal, needs all the praise it can get, and even if you went there on the back of this post and ordered those three things, paying through the nose for them from the a la carte menu, I doubt you'd feel it was a wasted journey. OK so, some of the lunch menu items could do with a bit of tweaking, and yes the staff could do with a couple of pointers but it is after all early days, and there was enough technique and ability demonstrated overall that indicates this is a restaurant going places. So instead of a rave, or a rant, or any kind of coherant narrative, I'm just going to tell you to order those dishes I liked, avoid the ones I didn't, and see if you don't have a jolly good time yourself.

7/10

I paid for my first two visits, then was largely comped on the third.

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Manchester House, Manchester

I have this theory, which may or may not have any basis in reality, that the dominant architectural style in any given town or city marks the point in time in which said town or city was at its most important and prosperous. So plucking a few examples at random, there's Lavenham in Suffolk, whose perfectly preserved 15th century half-timbered streets indicate the time in which the wool trade was at its height and it was one of the wealthiest parts of the country. Or the wonderful Regency terraces of Bath and Bristol, cities that grew rich on the 18th century slave trade with the American colonies. Once these industries peaked, the demand for contemporary buildings lessened and we are left today with these moments frozen in architectural time.

And so it is with Manchester and Liverpool, administrative capitals of the industrial revolution that for a good hundred years or so were the two most important cities in the country. Home to a collection of the most beautiful Victorian Gothic buildings you're ever likely to see, that so many of them have survived to this day is at least in part because those same industry forces responsible for their creation eventually faded and left areas like Castle Street in Liverpool, or Princess St in Manchester, as stately reminders of a time, only just out of the reach of living memory, where it seemed the whole world looked to the North West of England.

What's all this got to do with food? Well, only that whatever challenges Liverpool and Manchester hold for the restaurateur (including but not limited to "persuading people to pay more than £20 for an evening meal"), a shortage of stunning Victorian Gothic buildings will never be amongst them, and it must be frustrating to London food industry types, used to squeezing their ventures into ugly converted shipping containers or charmless shopping malls, to see the kind of places people are allowed to eat in up North - gleaming marble-decked palaces, ex-bank or insurance company headquarters with painted ceilings and grand stone staircases that were the wonder of the industrial age. Admittedly, most of these buildings house restaurant operations so utterly inept you'd sooner jump in the Manchester Ship Canal than revisit, but there are a few real gems, not least of which the French, housed in the Midland Hotel, where the food more than lives up to the stunning surroundings.

So it was somewhat of a surprise to discover that another Manchester chef with dreams of the heights of gastronomy, Aiden Byrne, hadn't found some beautiful old gothic pile to convert but had instead set up shop in a snazzily redeveloped 1960s tower block. The twelfth floor of the building is home to Lounge 12, probably the most intelligent and attractive bit of interior design I've ever been fortunate enough to drink a martini in, and the panoramic views of the city from way up there are worth the price of admission alone. But if anything, the space on the 1st floor housing the restaurant proper is even more jaw-dropping, a vast open kitchen complex leading to a spacious and beautiful dining space, all polished wood, floor-to-ceiling glass and industrial steel detail that brought to mind the very best of the Scandinavian restaurant style - in particular the lovely Amass.

A more theatrically exciting setting for a Modern British tasting menu can hardly be imagined, so I will forgive Manchester House their first mis-step in deciding not to even show us the cheaper lunchtime a la carte. An oversight, I'm sure, and there was no way we were going to be persuaded out of the 14-course Full Monty either way, but I would have liked them at least to have gone through the motions of offering us the 2 courses for £22 option, even if just to make us feel we weren't being taken for complete hopeless restaurant spods.

Anyway, as hopeless restuarant spods we were powerless to order anything other than 14 courses and matching wines, and pretty soon we were on our way with this trio of nibbles. From left to right, a squid ink rice cracker topped with some teeny but extraordinarily powerful cherry tomatoes and chunks of cured lemon sole, a raw scallop dressed lightly in vinegar and some lovely pickled green peppercorns, and a ethereally light potato mousse studded with chicken skin and foie gras which played with a beguiling mixture of temperatures and textures. All very cheffy, very clever, and extremely enjoyable.

"Cured halibut, mussels and lardo" was the kind of surf and turf arrangement that in lesser hands could have been a disaster - even on paper it sounds a bit of a mess - but the halibut was gorgeous, bound in a light mussel emulsion, and the lardo provided a delicate meaty seasoning. This is the kind of dish I go to restaurants for - top ingredients, innovation and skill all in one neat, gleaming, pig-draped package.

The next dish was perhaps a more conventional set of flavours - a goat's cheese and onion soup - but with a presentation that was nothing short of gasp-inducing. Somehow - and don't ask me how - they'd made a half-shell out of some kind of delicate soft frozen cheese, at the bottom of which sat a few cubes of Iberico ham jelly. Into this shell was next poured the most wonderful, frothy cheese and onion soup you can imagine, like a light fondue mixture, which melted the shell and turned it all into a silky cheese and onion and ham mixture, all hot and cold and with interesting soft jelly textures. A faultless bit of cooking.

"Butter poached frog's legs" were delicate and savoury, meticulously boned to produce a little lolipop of meat and with a dollop of caviar to season. Caviar and meat (that is, non-seafood meat) is a thing you're about to hear a lot more about - chef Elizabeth Allen is doing a popup based on fried chicken and caviar this month which you would do well to get yourself some tickets for.

This beautifully pink pigeon breast, gamey and dense with flavour, is presented with a little ballotine of I think pigeon leg meat, a neat quenelle of cherry sorbet and, in the middle there, Manchester House's own version of Heston's Meat Fruit, an extraordinarily convincing cherry-that-is-not-a-cherry, a foie gras paté covered with cherry sauce. Isn't it beautiful? And even the 'stalk' is edible spun sugar. An incredible amount of work had gone into this dish and you could taste every bit of it.

I wasn't as completely bowled over by this pig's cheek croquette as I had been by the previous run of courses, but then that's probably more to do with me than them. There's only so much I'm ever really going to enjoy pig's cheek, no matter how well it's presented and no matter what else it's delivered with, and so I could only muster a faint approval in comparison to the embarrassing raptures over the cheese soup or pigeon dishes. Still, I did enjoy it, particularly the sheet of sharp fermented pear jelly resting on top.

This pretty thing is a mushroom, snail and celeriac tart which, as you might imagine from the words "mushroom", "snail", "celeriac" and "tart" being used in close proximity, was a very fine thing indeed. A supremely delicate bit of pastry work containing a light, earthy mushroom filling, it was recognisably haute cuisine but also quite familiar to anyone who's ever eaten a mushroom vol-au-vent at a party in the 80s.

The grand finale of the savoury courses was hay-baked mallard, and being a huge fan of duck I could ask for nothing more. It was perfectly cooked to moist and pink, but then you'd expect that. What lifted this above most duck dishes was the gentle notes of hay smoke that lingered without being overwhelming, the crunchy kale which is always such a great foil for duck, and the salt baked beetroot which was almost meaty in its dense salty richness.

I think perhaps blue cheese ice cream is one of those ideas that work better as a concept than in reality. I can kind of see what they were trying to do here, a hybrid cheese course/dessert with elements of both, but it all hinged on the success of the blue cheese ice cream, and as it turns out, I do not much like blue cheese ice cream. Still, you've got to admire their ambition, and it was all very prettily done.

Much better was this chocolate and hazelnut arrangement, the chocolate Aero'd up into big bubbly chunks and with more of Manchester House's clever ways with ice cream. I'm afraid I don't really remember much else about this dessert, which could be because it was a fairly tried-and-tested collection of flavours and techniques or could be because we were one martini and 14 glasses of matching wine down each by this point, and my attention had drifted away from the dinner and onto making it to and from the toilet without crashing through the Christmas decorations.

Two points to be made before I attempt a summing up. Firstly, though service was generally attentive and the pacing perfect, the sommelier gave the very strong impression there was somewhere he'd rather be, and though I'm sure that's not the case (why wouldn't you want to be a sommelier in a restaurant as good as this), it was an unfortunate impression to give. Wine descriptions were rather terse and mumbled, and a couple of times we had to ask them to be repeated. Not a great issue in the grand scheme of things, but enough of a distraction to be noted. Also, as well as neglecting to show us the cheap lunch menu our server added a naff handwritten "thank you" note on the bill, something I'd expect in the US where you live off the tips but not in a top-end British restaurant costing £215 a head with service automatically included. Again, a little thing really, but there you go.

And yes, I'm afraid you read that right. Don't get me wrong, it was a storming meal, 14 courses of invention, passion and skill, matched with proper grown-up wines, and we enjoyed every second of it. But £215 (the bill above was slightly incorrect, listing a couple of drinks we didn't order) per person is about as much money as you'd really want to spend - or could spend - on lunch without it being one of those "once in a lifetime" meals and if I'm going to be brutally honest, there wasn't quite enough perfection, not quite the refinement or delicateness of touch that separates the top class with the truly world class. Of course it goes without saying that it deserves the Michelin star they so publicly are gunning for, that much is blinking obvious, but who the hell knows what Michelin are up to these days, and there's no point losing sleep over that. They'll probably get one eventually, it's just a shame it means so much to chefs (and their investors) when it's increasingly obvious the people in charge of giving out those stars have only a passing relationship with reality.

Often with overwhelming - and overwhelmingly expensive - meals like this you don't really finally make your mind up about a place not just after the buzz of alcohol has worn off but many days or weeks down the line. There's so much to take in on the day, so many facets to the food and nuances of service, that you need a bit of space to grow a sense of perspective and separate the excitement of the moment with the substance of what really went on. And now, a couple of weeks after the event, I'm happy to say that Manchester House is one of the best meals I enjoyed in the last twelve months, just not one of the best of the last decade, and I'm afraid for that wallet-busting bill that's probably what I felt I was entitled to. Still, what a thing it is, this gleaming temple of high-falutin' haute cuisine, another reason Mancunians should be very pleased with themselves indeed. Now, Liverpool, your turn.

8/10

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